The Transparent Sphynix: Political Biography and the Question of Intellectual Responsibility

file:///C|/milani.txt The Transparent Sphynix: Political Biography and the Question of Intellectual Responsibility Afshin Matin-asgari Abbas Milani, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington DC: Mage Publishers, 2000). 399 pages. Political biography has become a popular genre in post- revolutionary Iran. Government figures, leaders of political parties, academics, and professional writers have already produced a large body of autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, and semi-biographical fiction. When a triumphant Islamic Republic called for a radical break with the past, it also caused a deep sense of anxiety and curiosity about all that was suppressed, rejected, and denied. Despite, or perhaps because of this official sanitizasion of history, there seems to be an endless appetite for books about the Pahlavi era (1926-79). Thanks to the bleak realities of post-revolutionary Iran, not only the old regime, but even the Qajar monarchy (1796-1925) has now acquired a warm nostalgic glow in popular imagination. For example, in the late 1990s, a best- selling novel called Bamdad-e Khomar (Morning of Intoxication) caused a minor cultural stir by going against supposedly populist literary conventions to depict wealth and aristocratic privilege as positive values. Beyond popular culture, a certain historical revisionism seems to be at work in serious historical/biographical studies that, like Abbas Amant’s Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy: 1831-1896 (1997), take issue with pervasive but stereotypical representations of monarchy as the epitome of decadence and stagnation. Writing political biographies and autobiographies related to the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Republic, however, remains more politically sensitive and intellectually daunting. Immediately after his overthrow, the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, wrote Answer to History (1980). A naïvely self-serving account of the Shah’s reign, accomplishments, and fall, this book was of little historical import but it set the trend for a “literature of denial,” produced by the partisans of the old regime who, like the Shah, have denied its major flaws and/or their own contribution to its failures. Nevertheless, flickers of self-criticism began to show in works such as Parviz C. Radji, In the Service of the Peacock Throne: The Diaries of the Shah’s Last Ambassador to London (1983); and more so in posthumous releases like Asadollah Alam, The Shah and I (1991). Memoirs of foreign diplomats and heads of states, who were involved in Iranian politics, offer some new insights but are often too embroiled in justifying another country’s foreign policy priorities. Exercising their usual circumspection, academics and Iran experts have mostly steered clear of writing biographies of contemporary political figures. A notable exception has been Marvin Zonis, whose Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah, (1991) is critical and informed but too tightly framed in psychohistorical assumptions. file:///C|/milani.txt (1 of 22) [6/26/2002 9:49:18 PM] file:///C|/milani.txt Conscious of their own role in making history, political figures in the Islamic Republic have been more forthcoming in writing and publishing memoirs and diaries. Most of these, especially the writings of those in power, serve immediate political agendas. Still, they contribute to a general trend toward increasing awareness of contemporary history. Khomeini of course wrote no autobiography and official renditions of his life are highly hagiographic. A recent work, Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (1999) is journalistic and casts events in terms of the inexorable march of Islamist forces. But it is a vast improvement over earlier attempts, such as Amir Taheri’s The Spirit of Allah (1986), that remained at the level of gossip and slander. Treading these treacherous grounds, we now have Abbas Milani’s The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution. This is a biography of Hoveyda, the Shah’s longest-serving prime minister and Iran’s second most powerful man during the monarchy’s last two decades. Our first reaction is to commend Milani’s audacity to stick his neck out and tackle a bombshell of a subject. On closer examination, the book is an ambitious and sophisticated undertaking, easily the most outstanding in the genre of twentieth-century Iranian political biographies. Moreover, its controversial topic, engaging style, and readable prose make it appealing and accessible to an audience beyond the academe; and it will reach an even wider readership once (a censored or amended) Persian translation appears in Iran. Any such work is by definition controversial and provocative, but Milani’s book requires special critical attention because of its potential impact, particularly on the non-specialist public at large. While it has merit, The Persian Sphinx is ultimately a disappointing and misleading work because Milani has injected strong doses of political bias into his historical reconstruction. The careful reader will find almost all of the author’s assumptions, preoccupations, and conclusions summarized in the book’s preface. The first major point is the admission that writing about Hoveyda’s life has been a continuation, “by proxy,” of a previous autobiographical project: “...in pursuit of the riddle that was his life, I have had a chance to revisit some of the same landscapes that I had mined earlier while writing my own memoir.” Those who have read Milani’s autobiography, Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (1996), will remember the peculiarities of that work. Beyond childhood sketches, the book had a surprisingly short chapter on Milani’s intellectual formation during his student years in Berkeley, California, from the mid-1960s to 1975. At that time, Berkeley was one of world’s most culturally and politically vibrant cities. Milani, however, joined an anti-Shah Stalinist sect, whose weltanschauung was derived from close readings of Chairman Mao’s works and the Peking Review. He then generalizes this experience to characterize all Iranian oppositionists as closed-minded fanatics. But this is blaming others instead of admitting mistakes. Milani could have chosen the less dogmatic wings of the student movement or left the opposition for an independent intellectual path. Yet, he stayed with the Maoist group and was drawn into file:///C|/milani.txt (2 of 22) [6/26/2002 9:49:18 PM] file:///C|/milani.txt political entanglements that Tales of Two Cities mentions but does not clarify. The most poignant parts of Milani’s autobiography are the two chapters where his torments as a political prisoner of the monarchy are described. But an air of ambiguity clouds these sections. Milani tells us how after returning to Iran in 1975 he became a university professor and, still connected to the Maoist group, joined a “think tank” of supposedly reformist intellectuals formed around the queen. This must have been around 1975-76, the very time we find Milani publishing material praising the regime. Is he then implying that his pro-regime writings, including speeches for the queen, were done when he was in fact an undercover Maoist? There is no explanation and no clear chronology of events. By the end of his second year in Iran (about 1976-77) Milani was arrested because of his leftist contacts. He says that he had given up his revolutionary ideas “long before” landing in prison. He also mentions reaching a quick agreement with the authorities that allowed him to be freed in one year, but adds that media reports distorted his court testimony into praise for the Shah. Again this may be an oblique reference to Milani’s writings that were used to attack the opposition in publications by the political police (SAVAK). Tales of Two Cities does not give us clear explanations of these thorny issues. But it may suggest why Milani views Iranian politics as a dichotomous clash between fanatical opposition forces and a flawed but modernizing monarchy, a struggle in which real intellectuals had no choice but to join the latter. It is the continuity of this theme in The Persian Sphinx that makes it an autobiographical work “by proxy.” In the preface to The Persian Sphinx, Milani claims that writing this book convinced him that nearly all his perceptions about Hoveyda had been wrong, thus suggesting the reader might expect a similar experience. He then gives us a synopsis of what he learned about Hoveyda: “He was a true intellectual, a man of cosmopolitan flair, a liberal at heart who served an illiberal master.” Expressed in no uncertain terms, these words capture the essence of what Milani wants to convey about Hoveyda. He promises to reverse common perceptions by offering a sympathetic portrait of a man usually seen quite unfavorably. The same passage also summarizes Milani’s view of Hoveyda’s times: He lived at the height of Iran’s historical struggle between modernity and tradition, Western cosmopolitanism and Persian isolationism, secularism and religious fundamentalism, and ultimately between civil society and democracy on the one hand, and authoritarianism on the other. Readers who may be uneasy with such simplistic juxtapositions will be further alarmed as Milani immediately gives his opinion of the generation of Iranian technocrats and bureaucrats represented by Hoveyda: He embodied the hopes and aspirations, the accomplishments and failures of a whole generation of, usually Western-trained, technocrats who were bent on pulling Iran out of its cycle of poverty and repression file:///C|/milani.txt (3 of 22) [6/26/2002 9:49:18 PM] file:///C|/milani.txt and freeing it from the clutches of tradition. This of course is a mere repetition of what those same technocrats, including Milani himself, wrote in the 1970s to justify serving the regime. Milani then raises the question of the moral responsibility of Hoveyda and others who served the Shah’s regime in important capacities.

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